Calling the feud between Michael Oher and Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy “familial ups and downs,” the producers of the movie “The Blind Side” are clarifying details about the film.

Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove, co-founders and co-CEOs of Alcon Entertainment sent a statement to PEOPLE on Thursday addressing the backlash to Oher’s legal filing that caused critics, they said, “to unfairly pick apart the movie 14 years later — some going so far as to call it ‘fake’ or a ‘lie.’”

“The Blind Side is verifiably authentic and will never be a lie or fake, regardless of the familial ups and downs that have occurred subsequent to the film,” Johnson and Kosove’s statement said. “We are as proud of the film today as we were when our amazing collaborators made the movie 14 years ago.”

Oher filed a petition earlier this month asking a judge to terminate a conservatorship initiated by the Tuohys in 2004 — months after he turned 18.

“Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys,” according to his petition.

He moved in with the Tuohys just before his senior year of high school and later attended Sean Tuohy’s alma mater, Ole Miss. Oher asked for a full accounting of his assets considering his life story produced millions of dollars and he says he received nothing.

The Tuohy family statement said the idea that they sought to profit off Oher is “not only offensive, it is transparently ridiculous.” The statement notes the Tuohys are worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” and the notion they would “connive to withhold a few thousand dollars” defies belief.

In their statement, Johnson and Kosove clarified the collective payments earned by the Tuohys and Oher and addressed the “many mischaracterizations and uninformed opinions” that have emerged over the portrayal of Oher’s story in their film.

“In the story of The Blind Side we saw the better angels of human nature,” they said. “We saw it in the extraordinary courage that Michael Oher demonstrated in accepting the Tuohys’ generosity not as a handout, or as his saviors, but as a way through which he could improve his own life.”

The producers continued: “Michael’s academic accomplishments and athletic achievements demonstrate this. His raising of his own children now, who shall know a life of possibility the likes of which Michael never knew as a child, is the ultimate testament to Michael’s own strength and courage.”

“The Blind Side was a film that no major studio would make, back when Alcon financed the film in 2009. The prevailing ‘wisdom’ was that a football movie starring a woman would not appeal to football fans, it had too much football to appeal to families, and that movies starring Black actors don’t work overseas. Our opinion was that it would appeal to everyone, and, in 2009, when this country, and the world more broadly, was more hopeful and less divided — it did.”

Mark Heim is a reporter for The Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Heim. He can be heard on “The Opening Kickoff” on WNSP-FM 105.5 FM in Mobile or on the free Sound of Mobile App from 6 to 9 a.m. daily.